A profound meditation on a problem many of us will face; worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as Atul Gawande’s...
Doctors labor to cure disease and (recently) comfort the dying, but this moving memoir portrays a doctor practicing a new specialty that fills a gap between the two approaches.
Puri (Clinical Medicine/Univ. of Southern California), the medical director of palliative medicine at the Keck Hospital of USC and the USC Norris Cancer Hospital, hits the ground running with an impressive debut. The daughter of workaholic, immigrant physician parents who assumed she would follow in their footsteps, she acquiesced and dove into the field. During training, she thrilled to see her skills cure disease and relieve suffering, but she became increasingly disturbed when they didn’t. Repeatedly, she witnessed patients with devastating illnesses and little hope of cure made sicker by treatments the doctors themselves knew were futile. Patients and families usually encouraged this, in the belief that one must always “fight” disease; to do otherwise is to “give up.” Using often heart-rending examples, the author emphasizes that the best treatment of advanced cancer may not be more toxic chemotherapy. A victim of end-stage lung disease grows familiar with a respirator, but ultimately the lungs will fail to recover enough to breathe without it. Many patients live years bedridden with a respirator, their family praying for a miracle. A better alternative is to discuss what is happening and plan for a future where matters might not go as everyone hopes. Doctors hate doing this, so they discuss pros and cons, allowing the patient or family to choose. Thus, hearing that a treatment for metastatic breast cancer might prolong life for several months but also cause misery and harm, people usually choose treatment under the mistaken belief that treatment means “cure” and no treatment means abandonment. Called to assist, Puri recounts many painful exchanges, which, when successful, allow patients and those who love them to embrace a deeper understanding of their mortality.
A profound meditation on a problem many of us will face; worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal (2014).Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2331-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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